SELECTED WRITINGS ON RACE AND DIFFERENCE Edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Stuart Hall
SELECTED WRITINGS ON RACE AND DIFFERENCE
Stuart Hall: Selected Writings A series edited by Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz
SELECTED WRITINGS ON RACE AND DIFFERENCE Edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore
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Stuart Hall
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DUKE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON
2021
All essays © Stuart Hall Estate All other material © 2021, Duke University Press Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hall, Stuart, 1932–2014, author. | Gilroy, Paul, [date] editor. | Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, [date] editor. | Hall, Stuart, 1932–2014. Works. Selections. 2016. Title: Selected writings on race and difference / Stuart Hall ; edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Series: Stuart hall: selected writings | Includes index. Identifiers: lccn 2020021829 (print) lccn 2020021830 (ebook) isbn 9781478010524 (hardcover) isbn 9781478011668 (paperback) isbn 9781478021223 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Hall, Stuart, 1932–2014—Political and social views. | Race. | Multiculturalism. Classification: lcc ht1523.h355 2021 (print) | lcc ht1523 (ebook) | ddc 305.8—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021829 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021830
Cover art: Photo of Stuart Hall by Eamonn McCabe / Popperfoto via Getty Images
contents
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Acknowledgments Introduction: Race Is the Prism Paul Gilroy Part I
| Riots, Race, and Repres entat ion
23 one Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation [1959] 42 two The Young Englanders [1967] 51 three Black Men, White Media [1974] 56 four Race and “Moral Panics” in Postwar Britain [1978] 71 five Summer in the City [1981] 78 six Drifting into a Law and Order Society: The 1979 Cobden Trust Human Rights Day Lecture [1980] 97 seven The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media [1981] | The Politics of Intellectual Work against Racism
Part II
123 eight Teaching Race [1980] 136 nine Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society [1977] 161 ten “Africa” Is Alive and Well in the Diaspora: Cultures of Resistance: Slavery, Religious Revival and Political Cultism in Jamaica [1975]
195 eleven Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980] 246 twelve New Ethnicities [1988] 257 thirteen Cultural Identity and Diaspora [1990] 272 fourteen C. L. R. James: A Portrait [1992] 286 fifteen Calypso Kings [2002] Part III
| Cultural and Multicultural Questions
295 sixteen Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1986] 329 seventeen Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998] 339 eight een Why Fanon? [1996] 359 nineteen Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about “Race”? [1997] 374 twenty “In but Not of Europe”: Europe and Its Myths [2002/2003] 386 twenty-one Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities [2006] 409 twenty-two The Multicultural Question [2000]
435 Index
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Place of First Publication
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acknowle dgments
I should like to thank a few people. More than thirty years ago, Stuart Hall shared many hours with me in cafés and his kitchen, while we talked at g reat length about what a book containing some of the pieces in this volume might look like. Two doctoral students—Hilary Wilson and Patrick DeDauw— provided excellent research and editorial assistance. Paul Gilroy invited me to collaborate on this project; I am grateful above all for his friendship. And thank you, Craig Gilmore, for everything else. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Introduction Paul Gilroy
Race Is the Prism
The biography of Stuart Hall is well known. It need not be rehearsed again here. His valuable writings have circulated around the world over a very long period of time, drawing responses from all directions and disciplines. The work has been reexamined in detail since his death by readers eager to learn from him and to absorb his many insights into the complexities of our pre sent crisis. Yet I have occasionally overheard very sophisticated academics amusing each other with stories of their surprise at finding out Stuart Hall was a black man who had been born in Jamaica. Those pretended epipha nies unsettled me. It would be unwise to overinterpret casual comments of that sort, but discovering Hall’s Caribbean origins or migrant identity could be a shock only in a world where the mission of black intellectuals re mains impossible, where being a black intellectual is unimaginable: a freak ere those silly, shameless remarks premised on an ish possibility. Not only w extraordinary ignorance of the breadth of Hall’s concerns, commitments, and interests; they were also symptoms of a more widespread and telling failure to understand his political formation and trajectory. This anthology is intended to encourage an entirely different approach. It begins from the provocative possibility that reckoning with the place of race and racism in Hall’s thought is indispensable for coming to terms with the meaning and the politics of his intellectual work as a whole. Since his pass ing, the resurgence of authoritarian and ultranationalist populisms, to which racism remains integral, confirms that the dynamic, potent effect of appeals
to race, and the mobilization of racist discourses, needs to be better under stood. Race is, as Hall memorably puts it, a “floating signifier.” It is also the atter of political ontology, located at the epicenter of our highly charged m volatile environment bounded by nationalism and civilizationism. The question of how analysis of racial formations might be lodged within the larger architecture of Hall’s perspectives on critical and cultural theory has acquired greater importance as his intellectual legacies have congealed. Clarification of the difficult conceptual and interpretative issues raised by racism and the politics of race promises more than just a better grasp of the course of Hall’s own thought and the critiques of liberal piety on racial matters that he delivered so inspiringly and energetically from the Left. It can illuminate his shifting relationship with the spectrum of socialist poli tics, with the New Left, Marxism, and feminism, as well as the international Black Power movement and the ongoing processes of decolonization that were unfolding in Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. These pieces can be read first for the way that they reveal him acquiring a sense of the historical and epistemological significance of racism and race, and then for his eloqu ent attempts to persuade his readers of their signal political importance.1 That way of proceeding affirms the wisdom in not approaching “race” as a separate, freestanding topic but focusing instead on the racism that animates and mobilizes races dynamically, and almost always violently. The problems that converge under those vexed headings can then be used to assemble an apparatus for thinking critically about a number of interrelated issues: culture, power, democracy, and the partial, abbreviated forms of justice and freedom that race-friendly capitalism allows. For Hall, analyzing racism and race in that way helps to identify the seams that separate critical knowledge from tradi tional knowledge. It can foster an expansive politics of intellectual work, inside and outside universities. Racism is not another layer of misery to be logged and added to the dismal effects of other social processes. It has a constitu tive power. It shapes and determines economic and political relations. We can learn to look at history, culture, economic and social relations through the frame it affords us. Hall discovers and then repeats his enthusiasm for the idea that race has provided “a prism” through which (British) people are “called upon to ‘live through’ to understand, and then to deal with crisis conditions.”2 The idea of race provides “one of the most important ways of understanding how this so ciety works and how it has arrived at where it is. It is one of the most important keys, not to the margins of society,” but offers insight “right into its dynamic 2
| Introduction
centre.”3 In conjunction with Hall’s scrupulous commitment to historically in formed analysis of concrete situations, in other words to commentary produced in tune with the expectation that it will, in time, become intelligible as coun terhistory, this approach represents something like a methodological postulate. The distinctive “general syntax” of racisms must, of course, be understood in all its performative complexity.4 Their protean capabilities must be scrupu lously periodized, but the promiscuous effects of this “scavenger ideology” are laid bare by detailed historical study and should not be brushed aside.5 As far as British history is concerned, these texts help to trace the evolu tion of Hall’s concern with racism and the effects of racialized inequality from the era of Suez and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, through Enoch Powell’s cataclysmic “Rivers of Blood” and beyond to the righteous riots of the 1980s, into the artistic bloom of Britain’s Black Arts movement during the 1990s, the multiculture debates of the Tony Blair years and the crisis of neoliberal culture and society that followed. If that provincial genealogy supplies an immediate context for Hall’s serial commentaries and critiques, it should also be clear that his thinking evolved in a transnational, “diasporic” conversation with the work of other black writers drawn from various languages, locations, and generations. Caribbean travelers, “in but not of Europe,” like C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Andrew Salkey, Marion O’Callaghan, and John LaRose, are only the most obvious figures whose journeys into, through, and beyond European thought in general and Marxism in particular might now help to illuminate and explain Hall’s own path. Their achievements, creative and radical, supply constant points of reference in the dialogical motion of his voice as it drifts in and out of its teacherly register. This archive also shows how the urgently political aspects of Hall’s writing are connected to the more elaborate theoretical positions and concerns that underpinned them and how they can continue to be useful. Their ongoing rel evance is less a matter of elevating the interventionist pieces to a theoretical al ere not originally intended to function and more about the titude where they w slow labor of tacking between the different instances of reflection—concrete, abstract, concrete in abstract—that, when understood in concert, can bring alive his unique perspective and conceptual system. Tracking and reconstruct ing that shuttling movement reveals all the care and energy that he directed toward the goals of catalyzing and nourishing new cohorts of political intel rders, lectuals. They could be brought together by the critical study of racial o hierarchies, representations, and signs. As the British Black Arts movement Introduction
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began to flourish and to amplify the emergent political voices and artistic achievements of the c hildren and grandchildren of the 1950s settlers, it became obvious that this mode of education was far from a narrowly academic matter. Hall’s characteristic approach to theoretical matters is set out rigorously in the better-known position papers included h ere, especially the essays that w ere aimed primarily at academic debates and remote or cosmopolitan constituen ose dispersed readerships, outside the anglosphere, seem cies like unesco.6 Th to have encouraged him to experiment and take the greater intellectual and political risks that his more usual Left milieux would not so easily accommo date. His engagements with Marxism and post-Marxism are deep, his employ ment of sociological reasoning fluctuates creatively, and his range of references is exceptionally wide. Disciplinary boundaries are breached with a chuckle. Poets jostle with filmmakers and philosophers to demonstrate the insubordi nate agency of culture in the sham stability of formal politics. Colin MacInnes, ere, is cited again whose London fiction is discussed in the opening essay h when one of his later and more obscure novels, Westward to Laughter, pops up in the context of Hall’s lucid commentary on Caribbean pluralism.7 A large number of rhetorical tones are immediately audible: the serious, if decidedly ambivalent intellectual commentator, the cultural translator, the teacher, the unrepentant activist, the insightful critic, and the partisan reporter are a few of them. Hall’s writing speaks to all of the discrepant constituencies suggested by those contending labels. Those groupings enjoyed varying appetites for the “jouissance of theory”8 and the practical political tasks of immediate action, especially in difficult institutional and governmental settings like the broad cast media and the criminal justice system. The attention devoted to lived cul ture fosters the ability to see not only how those fields overlapped but how they were articulated together, bonded expressively by the iteration of potent racial tropes and symbols. Hall’s focus on the role of the media was innovative and influential. Several pieces in this volume show that he was the first aca demic to identify the systematic construction and structural configuration of racist discourse in Britain’s media (mis)representations as well as to highlight the reproduction of racism as common sense. This aspect of his work devel oped an analysis of the political problems that arose with the stereotyping of black figures beyond the boundaries of news and current affairs television. By encountering Hall’s work in a rough historical sequence and reading these texts as one extended body, we hope that, as his intellectual preoccupa tions, passions, and symptoms emerge, these essays, articles, and talks will be understood differently. Their primary objects, race and racism, are no
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longer marginal. They cannot be reduced e ither to the machinations of capi talist economic life or the melancholy drama of postcolonial psychopolitics. Their mutual assemblage on the terrain of culture challenges the reader to adopt a difficult interpretative angle capable of capturing the ceaseless inter play of material interests with racial signs, structures, and systems as well as the trauma of racialized suffering. These writings readily reveal that the arc of Hall’s political imagination did not bend in one direction only, from the properly academic and the authentically militant, down toward the frothily cultural. Instead, his inter ventions and commentaries seek out moments and problems that convey the urgency, and the value, of taking the neglected fields of culture and repre sentation much more seriously than the dour cults of the British Left would usually permit. The politics of racism and race supplies Hall with trials and tests that can synchronize and sometimes unify his various perspectives and accents. This coordination directs readers to the adjacent problem of how his extensive reflections on racial division may have shaped his analy ses of culture, ideology, and discourse or guided his approach to capital ism’s mystified kinds of domination and subordination. They are asked to think about how his relentless engagement with the exploitative systems, symbolic dreamscapes, and psychological fantasies on which the racially or dered world relies might have conditioned his innovative approach to what he terms the problem of articulation. How did Hall’s analysis of Caribbean and South African social and economic relations inform his observations on ese are not entirely multiculture and multiculturalism found elsewhere?9 Th abstract inquiries. They remain important for how Britain’s “indigenous” racism is to be interpreted, for how it might be undone, and for contemporary debates over exactly how the post-1945 history of Britain’s movement for justice and against racism is going to be written. Apart from his close familiarity with the impossible possibilities raised by the unmapped intellectual heritage of the Caribbean, Stuart Hall was a consis tent if irregular participant in the public culture forged by black and antiracist movements in the United Kingdom during more than five decades.10 These texts help to survey his contribution to those discussions, but they are only a small, indicative selection. Firmly localized concerns with injustice, antira cism, and racialized representation have been braided together with more gen eral conceptual statements. Each dimension enhances and offsets the others to form a whole, but never a final, political interpretation. Here again, the last instance never arrives. In that process of deferral, racism is pluralized and Introduction
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becomes an object worthy of critical investigation rather than some transient, diverting illustration of how ideology can function as a material historical force. The less familiar pieces gathered here were first printed in a range of ephemeral publications. They stretch from the output of groupings like the Caribbean Artists Movement11 and the National Association for Mul ticultural Education to the public outreach organs of the failing Kinnockite Labour Party as it struggled in vain to make itself less doctrinaire and paro chial in response to the gains of Thatcherism.12 Without reconstructing the debates that were conducted within and around Britain’s movement against racism at the time, we may say that these interventions and commentaries tacitly enacted an important change of per spective. They suggest that struggles against racism and racial hierarchy can productively be understood as contributions to the salvaging and consolida tion of Europe’s ebbing democracies. This was possible even as the looming effects of national democracy’s divorce from global capitalism began to be evident. In that dwindling civic light, holding the police to account for the systematic misuse of power revealed in their perennial conflict with Britain’s black citizen/settlers was not simply or exclusively a matter of concern to ra cialized minorities, to blacks and other ethnic groups. Th ose campaigns of fered a precious opportunity to imagine, and sometimes to conduct, justice differently: in proximity to the vital politics of truth and rights. It became possible, for example, to ask what law and legitimacy should be outside of their monochromatic coding in abject black and superior white. Analyz ing racism could not be stabilized or formalized as a disinterested academic pastime. It carried with it the onerous abiding obligation to specify how a world unshackled from the cruel constraints of racial hierarchy might actu ally differ from the present tainted arrangements. Whether focused acutely on politics or policy, many of the resulting battles sought the extension of democracy. Their demands were enhanced by the images of social transformation that had been pending in racism’s repudiation and could be glimpsed in its occasional momentary overcom ing. That utopia is not captured in the ideal of colorblindness. It aspired not just to vague reform and reconstruction in the name of enhanced equality of opportunity or what we might now call a corporate McKinsey version of multiculturalism but explicitly to a reconstructed socialism and to what the feminist political culture of forty years ago described as the projection of politics in prefigurative forms.13 These were political strategies that could identify and thereby hasten alternative ways of living, (inter)acting, and
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governing. Today, those elusive possibilities can provide encouragement for historical assessments of race and politics that aim to take critical reflection beyond the necessary but insufficient task of repetitively tracing the familiar debilitating outlines of Europe’s postcolonial crisis. Black movements in pursuit of freedom, justice, and independence ini tially developed from the brutal experience of enslaved, exploited imperial subjects and colonial p eoples. Via abolitionism and anti-imperialist strug gles, they expanded into a broader pursuit of equality, liberation, and a world purged of capitalist exploitation and racial hierarchy alike. Sometimes those hopes were rooted in religious outlooks, sometimes in communist schemes; at other times, their motivation was entirely profane, practical, or urgently defensive. The social and political movement against racial hierarchy that resulted from those alignments may be muted these days, but the residual glow from these pieces suggests that it might yet be revitalized. Stuart Hall was, among his other inclinations, a movement intellectual. He was alert to the ways in which the early phases of anticolonial action con ditioned later responses to the British Empire’s thwarted postimperial settle ment. His insistence on culture as a lived relation encouraged examination of how Britain’s chronic crisis was played out in and through race. Thus he was able to identify the core dynamics of an authoritarian, populist national ism in which attachment to the comforting idea of unbridgeable, absolute racial difference has proved both fundamental and enduring. The resulting conflicts have now extended across several generations and been expanded to incorporate settlers, migrants, and refugees from all the corners of what was once Britain’s planetary colonial dominion. Among young activists today there is considerable hostility toward the idea of black as a political color accessible to all nonwhites, especially those who had been victims of Europe’s colonial and imperial adventures. In that climate, there is real danger that Hall’s apparently old-fashioned view of race politics w ill be harshly judged b ecause it fails to coincide with the contemporary taste for essentialist self-scrutiny and the accompanying re treat of antiracism into the private interpersonal world beloved of Instagram warriors who dream that racial structures and habits can be overthrown by online gestures alone. Mainstream visibility and inclusion are not the final frontiers of antiracist politics, nor is “self-care” among the ultimate obliga tions of a black revolution. What Hall calls the “political roof ” provided by that open, now anachronistic notion of blackness is an important part of what remains at stake in these proceedings.14 The idea that black is not a Introduction
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phenotype or a physical description but, rather, an identity and collectiv ity assembled in adverse circumstances and conditioned by the effects of systematic racism may no longer correspond to the brittle edifice of con temporary black struggle. However, the effort historically to understand how and why black politics in Britain assumed an ecumenical configuration is now a valuable learning opportunity. That act of imagination and solidar ity can itself be educative. It can usefully reacquaint us with the combative mentality required if the cause of antiracism is to be redeemed from the twin seductions of narcissism and nihilism that have dominated it of late. At home, racism, nativism, and xenophobia have been bolstered by learned ignorance of imperial history and a media ecology premised on the idea that blacks are an alien presence that had been foisted on a perennially innocent nation by its duplicitous political leadership. Hostility to the black presence was generated by fantasies of grave injury to national homogeneity and indigenous white pride. Exclusionary violence was answered by a com bative outlook wrought, by young blacks in particular, from fragments of the dissident Ethiopianism of the Caribbean diaspora. Drawing on that struc ture of feeling from the rougher end of the poor educational deal Britain offered to all its working-class youth, the forces that the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has identified as “the rebel generation” challenged what could count as worthwhile historically rooted knowledge. In the process, they re affirmed an anticolonial tradition specified in a selection of mostly Jamai can political ancestors: Nanny, Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey, Norman Manley. In time, that pantheon would be supplemented by additional heroic figures drawn from US Black Power and southern Africa’s liberation struggles. Most important, the memory of Atlantic slavery was mobilized to infuse new chapters of dissidence with those bloody modern histories of resistance and rebellion. A second element, which is essential for understanding Hall’s particular contribution, communicated the primary importance of policing and criminal justice in the everyday lives of settlers faced with apparently intractable institutional racism. These bold dispositions were animated by a critique of capitalism that, thanks to the cultural accent it gained from Hall’s elegant expansion of the Gramscian vocabulary, remains useful t oday, even as capitalism has evolved and assumed novel, unprecedented psychopoliti cal and technological patterns that cannot be accessed via the unamended nineteenth-century political language of class exploitation and uniformity. This selection demonstrates that Hall’s work was implicated in several phases of a long conflict that it helps both to chronicle and to explain. That
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continuing history has produced some small temporary victories in the bitter sequence of defeats that marks out Britain’s relentless transformation from a partly social democratic nation to a much less equal society saturated with neoliberal common sense. Like the other Caribbean incomers of his generation, Hall felt Britain resound to the shocks that followed the discomforting reduction of its global power and reach. The country’s postimperial diminution was conveyed by the largely unwelcome appearance of citizen/settlers from the half-known tropical edges of the old empire. They bore the sacred dark blue passports that qualified them officially for belonging, but they were doomed by their unsought immersion in the country’s interminable quarrels with itself along the irreparable rifts of class, region, generation, sexuality, and gender. The incomers had their precious colonial citizenship stripped from them by Left and Right governments alike. Their battles to restore dignity, secure recognition, and transform justice gradually yielded to the malign effects of globalization and were swamped by the austere experiment in virtual and networked social life we see today, triangulated by the imperatives of priva tization, militarization, and financialization. However, the warm, active im print of e arlier conflicts can be detected in the damage that is still being done by the characteristically British blend of racism with amnesiac nationalism that Hall saw as the motor for the nation’s distinctive pathological racism. His writing on race and difference now offers a welcome opportunity to re-endow an insurgent history of postcolonial settlement in the regressive order to which we are in danger of becoming resigned. It bears repetition that loud, radical demands for justice recurred at the center of more than half a c entury of opposition and resistance. Policing and unjust law w ere important foci for the militant political energy released by Britain’s grow ing black communities. Much of that bleak history has not passed through the filters that determine and fragment the contents of the digital archive. Indeed, that archive may now have been forsaken in favor of more spec tacular viral narratives of cruelty, triumph, and uplift sourced from African American culture and experience. However, it can be salvaged and retains the power to deliver an insightful understanding of power and statecraft centered on the contested meaning of racialized difference and the changing political currency of racism, both overt and inferential. One key mechanism in the metabolism of Britain’s indigenous racism was the repatriation of colonial habits to the no-longer-imperial core. Gov ernment in the colonies differed markedly from the standard metropolitan Introduction
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arrangements. The colony revealed, as Fanon had seen, distinctive, “excep tional” ways in which power was both spatialized and militarized. We have now learned the hard way that Europe’s colonies functioned as laboratories not just for biometric police-craft like fingerprinting but for innovative legal and commercial instruments as well as enhanced varieties of killing tech nology. We are less well acquainted with the way that the spaces of death emanating from those brutally compartmentalized colonial orders incu ere pitched against bated anticolonial demands for a reparative justice that w the cruel abuses of imperial exploitation made legitimate by racial hierarchy. In the aftermath of conquest, colonial locations w ere administered through the closest of alignments between police and military powers. Hall saw that intimate association being brought back home and applied organically to management of the principal urban areas of black settlement that were per ceived increasingly as repositories of alien social and cultural pathology. As formal decolonization was transacted in Britain, the Trojan horse of New Commonwealth immigration was thought to have accomplished the invasive task that the Nazis had not been able to complete. The incorrigible patterns of colonial mismanagement appeared again, this time inside the grimy gray fortifications of downwardly mobile overdevelopment. The ranks of London’s Metropolitan Police w ere certainly swollen with ex-military personnel back home from their cold wars against insurgents, communists, and terrorists, but the problems ran deeper still: into a culture of impunity warranted by colo nial mentalities that routinely saw blacks as infrahuman and therefore ex pendable regardless of their formal citizenship status. This was the period in which blackness and immigration w ere rendered synonymous. That knot ted association has had awful consequences that still haunt populist politics in the United Kingdom. So far, the resulting tangle has proved impossible either to cut or undo. It is important to bear in mind that Hall’s sense of politics led him to con tribute in different ways to several community-based inquiries into police conduct, institutional racism, and criminal justice. Most notably, these were Southall 23 April 1979, the National Council for Civil Liberties (nccl) report into the west London police riot; Policing in Hackney 1945–1984, the Family Support Committee independent inquiry report into the policing of Stoke Newington; and A Different Reality, the West Midlands community inquiry into the Handsworth riots of 1986. Th ose key documents are not, at the time of writing, available online, but they are nonetheless essential for any serious historical analysis of this pivotal period in British political life.
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In a sharp contrast to the ambitions of those later publications, the police “Nigger Hunts” of the 1950s and 1960s had been modestly chronicled by respectable campaigning groups like the West Indian Standing Conference and the Colonial Ex-servicemen’s and Women’s Association.15 These early organizations were often shaped by a sense of belonging and dignity deriving from the military labor of the “Windrush generation” in the Second World War. Like the Indian and Pakistani Workers’ Associations, t hese bodies were imprinted with the trade unions, leftist and communist traditions that in comers had acquired in the formerly colonial zones. The community organ izations created by the entitled citizen/settlers w ere initially content merely to enumerate police wrongdoing and structural bias in the operations of criminal justice, education, and housing, public and private. It took some years for them to adjust their conceptions of belonging and move beyond the task of documenting systematic discrimination. Gradually, they began to define altogether different juridical conceptions of equality that would be dissociated from racial hierarchy and capable of sustaining campaigns for the accountability and transformation of state power in general and police power in particular. It was even longer before those bold dispositions could breach the fiercely defended conventions of British socialism and feminism. After the Conservatives had flirted with borrowing the neofascist in abour Party of junction “Keep Britain White” for an electoral slogan, the L Harold Wilson’s era began to argue that legislation against racial discrimi nation would be necessary if US-style unrest was to be avoided. That ini tiative required a specific analysis of the political risks and ethical dangers associated with the institutionalization of racial prejudice. Once again, Hall’s critical and imaginative work played a key role. He supplied sophisticated foundations and welcome political orientation for the postcolonial social movement against racism that had emerged from t hose difficult conditions. That formation was tied to the oppressed social lives of incoming settlers, but it mutated quickly as the bleaker fates of their locally born children and grandchildren gradually came into view. The rising rebel generation was in spired by decolonization, civil rights struggles in the United States, and Cold War conflicts alike. Its cosmopolitical gestures have now been dispersed, but its insurgent contributions w ere notably present among the struggles that attended the birth of Britain’s multicultural and multiethnic society. Today, their echoes endure in ongoing battles to reanimate and sustain it. However, the concept of racism has passed out of favor, displaced by the internet-borne rhetoric of antiblackness and Afropessimism. Th ese essays Introduction
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and talks can be read for their sense of what might be gained politically by racism’s reclamation from vacuity and the restoration of its tarnished value. Hall’s perspective is firmly historical. It drew on resources unearthed by the scholarly research of James Walvin, Edward Brathwaite, Folarin Shyl lon, and others. That commitment to history came bolstered by the idea that the narrative of black life in Britain was unfinished and the related be lief that its completion would necessitate an extensive and perhaps pain ful rewriting of the country’s national self-understanding. The classic essay “Race and ‘Moral Panics’ in Postwar Britain,” which sets the creative tempo of this anthology, begins to identify what these adjustments would involve. An initial corrective course was indicated by analysis of the nodal “turning points” that Hall presents as important constituents of Britain’s local variant of racialized politics. The first of these moments was marked by the riots of 1958 in Notting Dale and elsewhere.16 Hall had witnessed them anthro pologically from his position as an antiracist activist and secondary school teacher in London. The extended book review essay that begins this anthol ogy explains that “the ins and outs of racial prejudice” were of concern to him from the late 1950s, not least b ecause through them he was able to com prehend the close connections between race and the emergent politics of youth and youth culture in the turbulent aftermath of the war. Racial riots and the complex, ambivalent reactions of the “secondary modern genera tion” captured the quickening of larger cultural shifts in British social life that would be traced in greater detail in many of his later essays. The Young Englanders pamphlet was published the year before Enoch Powell’s epoch-making prophecies had been offered in response to the Labour government’s tepid, well-meaning attempts to outlaw racial discrimination in the provision of private dwelling space. It picks up some threads from the late 1950s survey but augments those germs of insight into a richly textured treatment designed to alter the emerging sociological fixations on prejudice and the challenging behavior of dark strangers in Britain’s “twilight areas.” The nascent sociology of race relations was held firmly at arm’s length, but the influence of Richard Hoggart’s sensitive, thoughtful work is obvious. His approach gets expanded and enriched as Hall finds his way toward an understanding of how black settlement is changing Britain and demand ing new ways of approaching questions of class, urban life, generation, and justice. He outlines an early version of an argument that would evolve and reappear in the succeeding decades. The cultural relationships enacted in fraught encounters between black and white involve systematic misrecogni
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tion as well as demands for recognition that were bellowed across the bar ricades and defensive camps that were being erected in Britain’s transitional zones during the era of the Co-ordinating Committee against Racial Dis crimination.17 Those racialized differences, overdetermined by class conflict and accelerated by economic and technological change, were not amenable to any tidy or even any dialectical resolution. The patterns of conflict, con tact, and coexistence they effected constituted a politics of identity—defined here as sameness, subjectivity, and solidarity—that required both extensive historical analysis and meticulous anthropological exposition. The signifi cance of racism in shaping the polity and, in particular, in strengthening the hateful but apparently endlessly productive populist strand in its political culture also became harder to overlook. Thanks to the affirmative efforts of Claudia Jones, Leslie Palmer, and nu merous others, the summer carnival in Notting Hill transformed the streets made notorious by the 1958 riots, the murder of Kelso Cochrane, and the fruits of Colin MacInnes’s literary imagination. While the likes of V. S. Nai paul, George Lamming, and Andrew Salkey created the West Indian novel ere being recorded in London, the Calypsonians that Hall recalls so fondly w in Dennis Preston’s studio on nearby Lansdowne Road. Their amused and amusing immigrant observations on the city’s postwar life fed directly into the bank holiday festivities that would supply an already syncretized pre cedent for more elaborate patterns of intermixture and recombination. In London, Jamaican culture could mesh with the outflow of Trinidad and the small islands. Persistent demands for dignity emanated from their asym metrical communion and provided a triple oppositional warrant, for rec ognition, for healing, and for saturnalia. The ludic disorderly spirit of tra ditional Mas gradually made room for the brazen rebel modernism of the sound systems. Those public excesses were, as the calypso essay also shows, initially accessible through musical vectors that could speak powerfully to white youth too. That seductive culture spread out through the bombed, de caying postwar streets that the incomers made home. That bleak, cold urban environment had already begun to incubate a great flowering of transplanted creole forms. In turn, that manifestation would contribute to a new moment of black cultural power pulsing out not from Jamaica but from the postco lonial metropolis to the newly wired world. The iconic figure of Bob Marley provides a useful cipher for the whole process he helped to consolidate, to invest with philosophical depth, and to reconcile with the hijacked language of human rights that defined it. Introduction
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A few years later, during the long, hot summer of 1976, all the pride, disil lusion, and resilience that Hall had noted in the pessimistic conclusion to the Englanders pamphlet blossomed in the young rioters’ angry rejection of continued injustice on the same west London streets. Similarly, worldly de mands for transcendent justice and reciprocity, now being imagined outside ere expressed in the many confrontations with the grip of racial patterns, w White Power skinheads and other organized neofascists which led up to the spring 1979 election that brought Margaret Thatcher’s government into power. Thatcher’s honeyed mixture of romantic nationalism and free mar keteering provided Powellism with a clean uniform, ventriloquizing his old populism to compete politically with the resurgent National Front. In April that year, Blair Peach, an antifascist demonstrator, was struck with an unauthorized weapon and killed by a police officer from the Special Patrol Group during what came to be known as Southall’s police riot. As I have said, Peach’s death led to an unofficial tribunal of inquiry established by the nccl under the chairmanship of Professor Michael Dummett, to which Hall made a significant contribution. That report was followed by several similar publications. They enabled Hall to elaborate further on the argu ments about racism, the national state, and the black communities that had been outlined in Policing the Crisis, the pathbreaking, collectively authored blend of deviancy theory, history, and Marxian political analysis that he had orchestrated and midwifed in 1978. The popular tribunals of inquiry into police racism that followed in the 1980s were parajudicial exercises, often organized in association with local trade unions. In some cases, t hese practical excursions into antiracist politics involved public hearings in which their respected expert panelists received detailed testimony from witnesses and victims. The resulting publications rested on solid academic and political foundations, often inspired by Hall’s wieldy formulations. It bears repetition that these initiatives w ere typical of a time in which political organizing accommodated the obligation to advocate prefigura tive, transitional forms that anticipated, and sometimes even summoned, ere alternative ways of living and organizing the world. Similar initiatives w adopted in the London boroughs of Islington, Tower Hamlets, and Lam beth, where independent research into local manifestations of police racism and misconduct was undertaken u nder the auspices of the now-forgotten Trades Councils. The resulting reports—Under Heavy Manners, Blood on the Streets, and Final Report of the Working Party into Community/Police
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elations in Lambeth—repay analysis both for the historical detail they pro R vide and their evident theoretical sophistication.18 The spring of 1980 saw an eruption of rioting in Bristol. A year later, it was followed by nationwide violent protests that stretched between April and July. Rechristened “uprisings,” those explosive events were the unholy culmi itter reactions against the habitual racism of nation of black communities’ b Britain’s police. However, in involving all tribes of hopeless, oppressed, and victimized young people, they opened into wider oppositional gestures based on common poverty, class, and gender. The period leading up to the 1981 ere part disorders and the overall shape of the conjuncture of which they w had been outlined in Policing the Crisis’s arguments about the “moral panic” around black mugging, the country’s drifting into a more authoritarian kind of society, and the rise of populist politics. It is significant that in exploring those processes the book had touched g ently on the complex theoretical issue of internal or endo-colonialism. That discussion had developed from political analysis of the racially segregated spaces of North America. Hall invoked it in a different setting through his notion of the “colony area,” an environment in which policing and law owed something to the modes of administration and enforcement more commonly associated with governing imperial and colo nial territory. The book’s concluding pages engaged directly with the equally sophisticated but clearly divergent analyses provided by respected organic intellectuals drawn from leading organizations within the black movement. While recognizing that the rebel generation’s desperate young p eople were fighting to escape the kind of employment their parents had taken on as a “super-exploited stratum” and a “reserve army of labour,” Hall insisted that their struggles should not be reduced too swiftly to a mass rejection of the forms of work that were available to them. Youth’s battles to be free from that “shit-work” were buoyed by an ill-defined but nonetheless alternative conception of social life. It was the substance of the unruly (sub)culture that they improvised from traces of Garveyism, Black Power, and antiracist sen timent melded with the vernacular appeals to the idea of human rights that had become commonplace in what would be known as the golden age of roots reggae. Again, the idea of nonracial justice strengthened moral foun dations of that combative stance. The race war that Powell prophesied in 1968 appeared more plausible once the scale of antipolice feeling had shifted from smoldering quotidian resent ment into more spectacular varieties of violent resistance. Angry reactions from every quarter encompassed a dawning sense of the chronic, intractable Introduction
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character of the economic crisis and the unsavory forces that had been un leashed by accelerating deindustrialization of the urban areas where blacks had provided a replacement population prepared to undertake the work that locals would not do and live in the squalor that they fled. The Conservative government’s official records, released some years afterward, revealed that Thatcher’s cabinet had quietly debated the likely fate of the riot-torn city of Liverpool if a Detroit-style strategy of “managed decline” was to be adopted. Hall’s interest in urban environments as repositories of cultural relations and political antagonisms continued. Their transformation during the next stage of Britain’s chronic crisis is treated at some length in his Amnesty Inter national lecture “Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities.” It situates the spatial effects of inequality and globalization in the context of the uneven habitable multiculture into which Britain had been able to drift only b ecause the national government had been entirely absent from the process of making it. The history of that creolizing process counterpoints a history of economic change and cultural innovation that saw the ambivalent mainstreaming of black life and style in prestigious as well as vernacular forms. They included the experimental output of the film workshops sponsored and supported by Channel 4 and the invigorating work of the new generation of artists associ ated with the emergent Black Arts movement that had been enabled by Hall’s enthusiastic deconstruction of outmoded aesthetic rules and constraining political recipes. He was extensively involved in the production of the report of the Runnymede Trustʼs Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain to the Blair government. It was a book-length document that, like the infor mal inquiries discussed above, made extensive use of his insights even if it attempted to recast them in the anodyne, think-tanky idiom of the policy- political establishment.19 Sections of that report covering policing, media, and education reveal the continuity and stability of Hall’s critical observations that stretched back at least three decades at the time of its publication. His reac tions to its disastrous reception at the hands of the tabloids and subsequent disavowal by its governmental sponsors supply the essential background to the thoughtful Pavis lecture here titled “The Multicultural Question.” I suspect that the mounting frustrations of a blocked national context from which the Left had e ither evaporated or become complicit in the Blair gov ernment’s rapprochement with neoliberalism w ere additional factors in Hall’s turn toward the alternative possibilities he saw signposted in the flourishing of Black Art, aesthetics, and their consequent need for institution building. In those less depressing settings, the diasporic subject whose appearance marked
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the end of political innocence and the acquisition of political maturity was a constant—if not quite a dominant—presence. New energies were released as the ectopic heartbeat of Britain’s black communities shifted away from its Caribbean defaults and moved toward Africa. A wider set of sustaining inter actions with black European artists, curators, and critics in other countries started to change the parameters of dialogue. In those debates, to which the essay on “New Ethnicities” was central, it was still possible to see, say, and learn new things. There, too, the political pedagogy at which Hall had ex celled for so long was able to win new audiences and interlocutors. His practical recommendations to the antiracist educators of the early 1980s read very much against the grain of current discussion, sounding like a reckless refusal of the signature sensitivities of the anxious “snowflake” generation. However, a number of things remain instructive. Hall’s thought ful advice to the activists and organizers of yesteryear has acquired a new resonance. It turns around a surprising proposition, namely, that the struggle against racism demands a high degree of discipline from its political advo cates who must not only reject the disabling simplifications of Manichaean ism and moralism but also learn to create and manage unsafe spaces in which the “combustible material” of “commonsense” and working-class racism is allowed to surface and breathe. His position is worth quoting at length: I do think you have to create an atmosphere which allows people to say unpopular things. I don’t think it is at all valuable to have an atmosphere in the classroom which is so clearly, unmistakeably antiracist that the natural and “commonsense” racism which is part of the ideological air that we all breathe is not allowed to come out and express itself. . . . That experience has to surface in the classroom even if it is pretty horrendous to hear—better to hear it than not to hear it. ese words were spoken almost four decades ago to a group of antiracist sec Th ondary school teachers. They do not now translate into some misplaced liberal endorsement of an inviolable, yet utterly banal, right to be offensive. Hall is restating a necessary commitment to the hard, demanding political work of building an innovative movement against racism that is premised on a reckon ing with the fundamental importance of culture’s political powers and moods. People are not simply either fervently racist or fanatically antiracist. There is substantial ground to be gained among those who have no self-conscious view or may not consider themselves political at all. The alt-right, some of whom have mimicked Gramsci while others transposed his twentieth-century vision Introduction
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into their high-tech, mediatized movement-building, have grasped that pos sibility. They articulate it in their trademarked insistence that politics is now located “downstream from culture.”20 Perhaps, even among them, the value of that insight has been underscored by understanding the significance of racism’s rational irrationality, which generates an intensity of political feeling invulnerable to the flimsy weapons of corrective reason. Looking at that insuf ficiency from what is left of the Left brings to mind another of Stuart Hall’s favorite chuckled phrases: “We are, comrades, in deep trouble.” notes I would like to thank Vron Ware, Angela McRobbie, Les Back, Iain Chambers, and Larry Grossberg for their comments and assistance. 1 On this point see also Hall’s interview with Les Back: Stuart Hall and Les Back, “At Home and Not at Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back,” Cultural Studies 23, no. 4 (2009): 658–88, http://research.gold.ac.uk/2321/2/At_Home_and _Not_at_Home-1.pdf. 2 Stuart Hall, “Race and ‘Moral Panics’ in Postwar Britain” (chapter 4 in this volume). 3 The name (National Association for Multicultural Education) journal final page. (chapter 8 in this volume). 4 Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes” (chapter 7 in this volume). 5 This idea was first expressed by the historian George L. Mosse in Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), 234. The formulation was developed further by George M. Fredrickson and Nancy Leys Stepan, among others. 6 Two of the essays in this volume (chapters 10 and 11) were written for unesco publications in which Marion O’Callaghan was extensively involved; they are Race and Class in Post-colonial Society: A Study of Ethnic Group Relations in the English-Speaking Caribbean, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico (Paris: unesco, 1977) and Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, introduced by Marion O’Callaghan (Paris: unesco, 1980). 7 Colin MacInnes, Westward to Laughter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). 8 This phrase is taken from Hall’s essay on Fanon; chapter 18 of this volume. 9 See, for example, the interview with Hall in the Sussex University student publica tion “Cultures of Resistance and ‘Moral Panics’: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Afras Review, no. 4 (1979): 2–18. 10 See, for example, Black People in Britain: The Way Forward: A Report of a Conference Held 17/19 January 1975 Written Up and Edited by Dr. Rajeev Dhavan on Behalf of the Post-conference Constituent Committee (London: pccc, 1976). Hall is listed as a “principal participant.” 11 See Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists’ Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (Finsbury Park, UK: New Beacon Books, 1992). Walmsley reveals
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12 13
14 15 16
17 18
19 20
that Stuart Hall had been active in the West Indian Students Society at Oxford and chronicles his participation in the cam conferences as well as his contribu tion to the cam special issue of Savacou in 1974 (chapter 3 in this volume). This is a reference to the Labour journal New Socialist, from which the essay of the 1981 riots has been reprinted; see chapter 5 in this volume. Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (Islington, UK: Islington Community Press, 1979), 71–79. This phrase comes from the intervention “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities” (chapter 17 in this volume). Joseph A. Hunte, Nigger Hunting in England (London: West Indian Standing Conference London Region, 1965). Edward Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988); Mark Olden, Murder in Notting Hill (London: Zero Books, 2011). The Birmingham-based Co-ordinating Committee against Racial Discrimination was formed in the early 1960s. Under Heavy Manners: Report of the Labour Movement Enquiry into Police Brutality and the Position of Black Youth in Islington Held on Saturday July 23rd 1977 (London: Islington Defence Committee, 1977); Blood on the Streets: A Report by Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council on Racial Attacks in East London (London: Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council, 1978); Final Report of the Working Party into Community/Police Relations in Lambeth, London (London: Borough of Lambeth, 1981). Runnymede Trust, The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain (London: Profile Books, 2000). This phrase is associated with the right-wing journalist Andrew Breitbart, founder of the Breitbart News Network. See also Hans Georg Betz, “Everything That Is Wrong Is the Fault of ’68: Regaining Cultural Hegemony by Trashing the Left,” Open Democracy, August 4, 2018, www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make -it/hans-georg-betz/everything-that-is-wrong-is-fault-of-68-regaining-cultural -hegemony-by-trashing-left.
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